At our July Destination z teleconference, I had the opportunity to talk
with Bob Buchanan, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at PathPoint
Software. Bob is a veteran of the computer software and hardware
industry with over thirty years of domestic and international
experience.

Marc: Hi Bob, PathPoint recently joined our Destination z
community. Can you tell me a little bit about your company and the
solutions you provide?

PathPoint’s dynamic approach eliminates the need to analyze static
source code and “play computer” as you try to find the right code. No
more guess work. PathPoint helps you find the right code.

PathPoint is also included in the IBM Global Services AMS Toolkit.

Marc: What are you finding are the greatest challenges your
customers are facing and how does PathPoint Software help them?

Bob: Our customers are often facing a variety of challenges. They
need to drive efficiencies into their mainframe application maintenance
efforts, including analysis, testing and performance. PathPoint
provides a means for customers to reduce analysis time by 50% or more
and testing time by 50% or more and identify the cause of application
performance problems. Our value proposition revolves around improving
personal productivity, which drives down the time and significantly
reduces the cost associated with many mainframe application maintenance
projects.

PathPoint Software also helps customers struggling to understand how
legacy online or batch mainframe applications "really" work – of major
importance to customers who are need to make changes to existing
applications or to identify the source of application problems. Users
of PathPoint simply enter a business transaction of interest, or job a
step number, and the product traces and captures the actual
application-processing path followed by that executing business
transaction – all without any change to source code. Information
captured in the actual sequence of execution includes: input screen,
programs called, call statements issued, tables/files accessed, how
tables/files are accessed (CRUD) and output screen. Optionally, Cobol
source code can be parsed during post processing to capture the
conditional logic related to executing business transaction.

Marc: PathPoint sounds like it really helps customers quickly
identify the “right code” in a mainframe application and relate this
code to change requests and other problems. Please tell me a little bit
more about PathPoint’s role in addressing application-level performance
problems.

Bob: PathPoint captures application level performance timings for
specified user-entered business transactions – very unique and valuable
information. For example, we capture the elapsed time per call
statement, the interim time between call statements, and the frequency
of call statements. Using this information, customers can quickly
identify the cause of bottlenecks in their applications and how to
improve application performance.

Marc: What economic benefit would a user of PathPoint derive?

Bob: First of all, the mainframe application budget is a
substantial portion of the overall IT budget in today’s corporations,
as you know. And, application maintenance consumes a large percentage
of the application budget itself. We are confident that PathPoint users
can reduce their mainframe application maintenance budget by up to 20%.
Why? Because PathPoint enables users to reduce analysis time by 50% or
more, reduce system and regression testing time by 50% or more, and
reduce overall project time.

Marc: How can folks find out first-hand about your product?

Bob: We encourage all mainframe sites to try PathPoint. The product
can be installed in as little as 2 hours and does not require any
change to source code. Visit our website for more details.

Marc: One last question, why is being part of Destination z a
valuable community association for PathPoint?

Bob: PathPoint is delighted to be a part of the Destination z
community. As an Advanced IBM Business Partner, a very active
participant in the IBM Academic Initiative program, we are eager to
engage in discussions with other IBM Business Partners serving the
System z community. We feel that the Destination z community enables
mainframe customers to understand that innovation continues in the
world of mainframe computing – PathPoint is just one example of such
innovation.